The future of food: where a hamburger is not what it seems

Science has overtaken common sense in the race to create
"healthy" foods.

FOR MANY people, a tasty and healthy hamburger would be one made
with simple, fresh and good quality ingredients.

But for the director of the CSIRO Food Futures division, Dr
Bruce Lee, a healthy hamburger is constructed from highly processed
and engineered ingredients containing substances, such as modified
protein fat replacers, designed to simulate the taste and
"mouth-feel" of a real hamburger, without delivering a high dose of
calories or saturated fats.

Australian food scientists, manufacturers, marketing gurus and
government regulators are meeting this week at the Food Safety
Conference to promote "new directions" in food production such as
these.

The CSIRO Food Futures research division is dedicated to
"tailoring raw ingredients to develop healthier foods that meet
consumer demands".

This includes the development of a number of "bioactive"
ingredients that serve particular functions, such as a glycoprotein
that has a satiating effect and thereby helps control weight, or
antioxidants from native fruits to prevent ageing.

Some of these nutritionally engineered foods and ingredients
stray into the realm of medicinal or pharmaceutical products, and
are made to sound like they tackle important public health issues.
But most applications are aimed at nutritionally tinkering with
highly processed and mass-produced foods and ingredients so as to
market them as offering health benefits.

The aim is not only to deceive our senses, but our common sense
as well. A consequence of nutritionally engineering foods in this
way is that they may undermine the trust we place in our own senses
to evaluate how healthy foods are, or the trust we place in
traditional, cultural and ecological approaches to food.

Instead we become ever more dependent on nutrition experts to
tell us what nutrients we should be eating, and dependent on the
food industry to deliver foods engineered with the required
nutrients, health benefits and simulated sensual experiences.

Within the food industry, the term for foods that are supposed
to serve a specific health or bodily "function" is functional
foods. It's not a term familiar to most people, although we'll be
hearing more of it in the years to come, since this, we are
assured, is the future of food.

It's not a particularly appetising term either  more
mechanical than gastronomical.

The food industry would like us to think that what distinguishes
"functional foods" from other foods is the "enhanced" or
"optimised" state of health that these foods deliver. But any
highly processed or poor quality food with a few added nutrients
would qualify as a "functional food" under these definitions.

What really distinguishes these foods, however, is the ability
to market their supposed health benefits. For this reason I refer
to these foods as "functionally marketed foods", rather than
"functional foods".

While the food industry has been marketing foods as healthy on
the basis of their nutrient content for many decades, it has also
been pushing to make explicit health and disease-prevention claims
on food labels, which are currently prohibited. The Australian Food
Standards authority has once again bowed to the interests of the
food industry, and is finalising new regulations to allow the use
of health claims from next year.

Since our health authorities consider a high body mass index
(BMI) to be a major cause of certain diseases, and to be

a disease in and of itself  although both are highly
contestable claims  any engineered food product that
restricts calorie absorption might one day qualify for an approved
health claim or disease-prevention claim.

The "functional hamburger", for example, might carry the claim:
"As part of a balanced diet, functional hamburgers may help reduce
the risk of heart disease and diabetes."

The "functional hamburger" could even be the centrepiece of the
forthcoming CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet Book for Kids. It
would certainly meet the diet's optimum macro-nutrient profile for
effective weight-loss, as it would be high-protein (lots of meat),
moderate-carb (the bun) and low-fat (the modified-protein fat
simulator). All of these nutritionally engineered and nutritionally
marketed foods and weight-loss diets have appeal only because we
are already in the grip of what I call the ideology of
nutritionism, or nutritional reductionism. The reduction of food to
its nutrient and biochemical composition has come to dominate the
way we think about food, particularly in relation to its
quality.

Nutritionism goes hand in hand with nutrition confusion, and has
provided the food industry with a powerful strategy for marketing
its food products. Like "functional foods", the ideology of
nutritionism undermines other ways of understanding and
contextualising the quality of foods.

We need to return to other ways of approaching and thinking
about food, as well as to look forward and to imagine other food
futures. In fact, in the spirit of technological innovation, I've
been experimenting with my new French-lentil pizza recipe.

The kids think it tastes all right, and it's pretty healthy too.
They have dubbed it "funky pizza", which sounds less scientific,
but more appetising, than "functional pizza".

Unfortunately, my funky pizza is high in protein (lentils), high
in carbs (flour and potatoes in the dough), and high in fat (lots
of cheese and olive oil), so it fails the CSIRO Diet's
macro-nutrient test.

Perhaps I could just sprinkle on a few bioactive nutrient
absorption inhibitors, and then the kids would be able to stuff
their faces.

Dr Gyorgy Scrinis is a research associate in the Globalism
Institute at RMIT University.

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